David Sharp - The Thriving Artist: Saving and Investing for Performers, Artists, and the Stage & Film Industries

I met David Maurice Sharp a decade and a half ago when a friend invited me to join the Thriving Artists Investment Club. A small group of artist acquaintances had banded together to learn how to invest. David was a founding member, and as a club officer and the most knowledgeable among us, had taken charge of the education segment of our monthly meetings. A dancer, actor, and choreographer, he had also distinguished himself as an expert in the world of finance. David was not the first dancer Id encountered with a gift for frugality and an uncanny sense for the numbersthese are survival skills that can make the difference between a brief dance career and a long one.

I had only recently taken my first full-time (non-profit) job ever, after twenty years juggling acting jobs and teaching with interim gigs as a word processor and personal assistant. Most of the members of the group were freelancerswriters, filmmakers, film editors, dancers, artists. Most of us were living on slim enough means that we were just able to make ends meet month to month. Some of us were carrying credit card debt. We were getting older and having to reckon with a future we had gambled against to follow our creative muses.

Six years later my husband and I purchased a two-bedroom co-op in New Jersey. We used the little pool of stocks Id carefully initiated under Davids guidance to help fund the down payment. Its a modest place, but it has lovely light, room for all my mates equipment, a dining room table, a desk for me, windowsills for the cats, a place to grow flowersand perhaps most of all, its ours. It is the sort of enoughthats as good as the proverbial feast.

By then I had moved on to my current position as Executive and Artistic Director of HB Studio, the Greenwich Village acting school and artists haven where I had trained and taught and where I have spent many happy years. Knowing well that many of our students, struggling to afford classes and the rent on their apartments, were probably hoping their financial futures would be solved one day by a bolt of lightning, I invited David to come do a talk about financial planning. Not long after he came up with a proposal for me: he would offer a yearly series of financial planning workshops